Zirka Dancers

We had some exciting guests at our school this week. It was a wonderful opportunity to watch these amazing young dancers from Zirka. We learned about the dance culture in Ukraine and the meaning of the beautiful costumes.

They also got the entire school involved in a dance! The students LOVED it!!!

In Language Arts, the students worked through a number of different activities to practice and sort their Words Their Way. The students meet with us each week to discuss the sorts, practice alphabetizing words, demonstrate their understanding of the meaning through "Write and Draw" and practice their words in sentences.

We also took some time to write about Spring Break. These pages will be put in their memory books and given to your child at the end of the year.

We spent a little time working on our next "All About Me" paragraph. The students are at various stages with writing and illustrating. These will also be included in their memory books as a keepsake for the year.

We have been working through our new unit in Math, Multiplication. The students have been practicing their skip counting forwards and backwards. They have also been working on repeated addition which will lead into multiplication equations.

The students received another "Tree Mail" challenge. They were asked to test different types of beams (box girder, rectangular beam, and accordion). They concluded that the accordion beam was the strongest because the zigzags evenly distributed the weight and did not sag in the middle. We talked about if this kind of beam was a "realistic" choice for engineers to use when building a bridge. Would this be cost effective? Would it be easy to make zigzags with steel? The students decided the box girder, which was the second strongest beam, would be the best choice if they were an engineer building with steel.

The students completed a second challenge, which asked them to create a shelter strong enough to withhold the downpour that is headed towards them. They were asked to test if a wider gap causes an arched shelter to be stronger or weaker than a shorter gap. They concluded that the shorter gap creates more of an arch, which is far stronger than the flat surface.

Here are the super start readers for the week!!! Way to go kiddos!

For Art this week, the students began the project by brainstorming "spring" ideas. The ideas were then put into complete sentences with juicy details and needed to follow an acrostic style of poetry, using the word KITES. After this was complete, they used some measurement skills to create guidelines for their kites. They then followed a pattern of "happy face"," sad face" to complete the kite. Once the drawing was complete they chose a "warm" colour and a "cool" colour to alternate within their design. They turned out great!!

Congratulations to our new Student of the Week!

Some of our kids were involved in some after school sporting events this week! We were very proud of all of you!